KNOTS

When I awoke, my customary surroundings were slightly – even imperceptibly – changed from what I remembered them to be. Not so much an alternate world or a parallel dream disguised as awaking or an onset of mild mental illness on my part (but who can be certain of that!) but rather something like a prelude to writing this. My Muse had evidently moved in the night ... just an inch there, a tweak there, a short shift of unfamiliar eyesight upwards, a slowly seeping flatulence with uncharacteristic lack of control.

The wallpaper was slightly less yellow while the open bedroom window had slightly yellower curtains that breezily welcomed a sun barely too early for Winter. My wife’s voice calling me from the supposed direction of the kitchen was a tone tuned to a fickle key. My formerly meticulous mirror – no doubt reflecting everything with mock exactitude – was out of kilter with an odd detail of my face on which one could not put one’s finger. Indeed I wondered if I had a finger at all, until I looked with some relief (and sadness) at my familiar wrinkled hand in the cold air.

But not all changes were slight, as I was later to realise when moving my gaze towards the wardrobe. It was covered in all manner of knots swagging en masse from top to bottom across the closed wooden doors. Knots to be knots, I knew, needed to be knotted from something ... knotted from something like string or thread or rope or wool or cotton but, as far as I could tell, this mish-mash was made up of pure knots. Not even knots in the wood.

And in this subtly mis-angled world into which I had woken I somehow knew these knots were called ‘ligotti’. I then wondered if my Muse had created a different language for this new sense of creativity but, then again, earlier, my wife’s customary words had called to me from the kitchen in my own language, the same language with which I had fallen asleep the night before.

Meanwhile, I fingered each ligottum with some feeling. At least, this proved that I wasn’t going out of my mind in subtly involuntary steps. The structure of the first ligottum I tweaked was precise if complicated, with the science of weave and the abandon of tangle combined to their miniature optimum -- a knot (in the old parlance) that was just that: a knot if nothing else.

I called to my wife to come upstairs. That broke all the rules as I normally went downstairs at the first call she made from the kitchen.

She and I had been married, it seemed, for centuries of comfortable loving habit. It took a brave heart to break such a habit with the smallest of reasons. If it had not been for the ligotti draped across the wardrobe doors like an ill-kempt mane, mine would have been the smallest reason. However, my guilt was assuaged by the presence of the imponderable knots which at least proved that this was simply not a subtly altered reality. This was big business stuff in the scheme of irrationality.

I stood shivering as I heard her climbing the stairs almost forever. She never seemed to arrive. Her painful sobs sounded as if she found the stairs either too steep or too far. Still, forever is never literally forever. Each ligature of language loosens at the last.